The day to day at Base Cero

Originally this post was going to have more photos but I forgot that all of my photos are on my external harddrive and not on this computer. I'll come back later and add photos, but for now enjoy the text :)

3:50 – wake up in my bed that is covered with a mosquito net. (While mosquitoes aren’t all THAT bad (unless you’re standing outside at dusk), ickier things like spiders and scorpions could crawl on us at night, so we use the mosquito nets to keep them away.) Get dressed in the dark because I’m one of the only ones awake this early. Put a pot of water on to boil for tea. Eat a bowl of cereal. Get my field gear ready and outside, ready to get in the car at 4:30.


4:40 – Once in the park, find the area of the study site I’m looking for on that particular day. (Because of the rains, we can’t drive on the dirt roads, and therefore use a complex systems of trails that WE cut to get to the areas we need to be in.) Put my recording gear together and get myself positioned near the nest of the bird I’m intending to record.

5:00-6:30 – Record the focal bird for an hour, while he sings his dawn chorus (dawn is when most birds, including my study species – the rufous-and-white wren – sing the most, and the reason I wake up so early is to get set up in time to record the dawn chorus).

6:30-11:00 – Go from territory to territory, trying to figure out the breeding stage of each pair of birds. Are they nest-building? Is the female incubating her eggs yet? Are they feeding nestlings?



11:20 – Get back to Base Cero (the field house), dump my field gear, charge my batteries, have a (nearly unbearably cold) shower and eat lunch (tomato and cheese sandwich, hummus, or leftovers).

1:00-5:00 – “Free Time” I usually spend a couple of hours logging (similar to transcribing) my recording of the morning – this will help me in the future when I try to extrapolate data from these recordings. I also read, write emails, chat, do laundry (we handwash all of our laundry here, and it doesn’t dry right now – not with all the rain!), exercise (we have a chin-up bar here, so I attempt/do chin ups, and pushups, mainly) etc.

[Now... I HAD a shot of me doing a chin up, but I think I have it on my external harddrive instead of this computer. Le sigh]

5:00 – Dinner prep time. Every 6 (or 7) day cycle, each person much be a chef once, an assistant chef once, and a dish-doer once. Sometimes on the 7th day we go into town and have Pizza Pronto (overly simple but delicious pizza served with the spiciest hot sauce I can handle). It’s been an adventure cooking for 6 people, but it’s pretty decent. I’ve cooked a bean tortilla bake with rice and veggies, fajitas with rice and beans, pasta with tomato cream sauce, pizza pasta, chili and... that’s it so fa. rTonight I'm making curry.

6:00ish – Dinner time.

7:00ish – Free time. This is when I spend most of my time writing emails and blogs. Sometimes I read a bit of fiction to help me wind down.

8:00 – Bedtime. I had no problem getting used to going to bed at 8pm.

how to tile a counter - Costa Rica style

Make sure the counter is ugly enough that it warrants re-tiling. Yup, this one sure makes the cut!




Scrape the paint off. Hmm, it almost looks better with bare concrete than it does with peeling, water-damaged paint.



Apply Plasterbond, a chalky blue substance that is supposedly a "sealer and adhesive". and yet it appears to be water soluble. hmm.... Make sure that you don't drink any plasterbond (I swear i didn't, even if it looks like I did).


Get the tile store to cut tiles for you (it helps if the two people asking for tiles are women between the ages of 23 and 30). Based on the poor construction of your counter to begin with, plus your quick measuring job, and the fact that the tile store may or may not account for grout when they cut you tiles, you will probably have tiles that don't quite fit. It's probably good that you took home a bunch of scrap tiles, but you still have to sand down the pieces that are just too big. The rough concrete floor on your back porch works well for this step.


Mix and apply mortar. The (spanish) instructionsn on the bag only give you the appropriate ratio of water to powder if you are intending to make the whole bag. You aren't, so you try to approximate a third of the bag. You don't know how thick it's supposed to be, but when you decide it looks decent you start applying. Note: if you have a limited wardrobe, it might be wise to avoid getting any of your clothes covered in mortar - it may not come off.



Set the tiles. Use little white crosses (spacers) that don't like to stay in place. Make sure to account for flaws in the counter's construction, such as edges and corners that aren't square. You will end up with crooked grout lines and tile that don't line up, but that's OK, right?

Let the mortar set over night. Apply grout on the next rain day. Use a rubber trowel. If you don't have a rubber trowel for this step.

If you don't have a rubber trowel, a my patented flip flop technique works just as well. I give you permission to use this technique if you ever need to.

And voila! a tiled counter!

pictures

No time for a written blog today, so I post some photos of me in the field, taken by Dan, my supervisor.

Rainy Season Part Two

My last blog was about the rainy season and how frustrating it is to get out of the car, realize it’s raining too hard to do anything, sit around for 1/2 hour and then go home. On Wednesday, we got up, got dressed, got in the car and drove for 2 minutes before the rain started. What’s really frustrating is a) our field house, which is only a 5 minute drive from the study site in the Park, doesn’t get rain even when the Park does so we don’t know that it’s raining in the park until we get there, and b) it doesn’t often rain right AT dawn, it rains until 3am, then stops from 3-5 and starts again. Meaning: it’s not raining JUST exactly when we wake up, so we get ready and head out into the park, only to be shut down by the rain. Fortunately, this morning it was raining at 4am, so we just didn’t get out of bed. That’s much more tolerable. AND I got to sleep in until 6am, woohoo! Which is good, because I was awake most of the night listening to rain on the tin roof. Speaking of, our roof is leaking. There’s a leak over the toilet, a leak near our shoes, and a rotten spot of roof above my bed that occasionally drops wood chips and other random junk onto my mosquito net. I moved my bed the other day to avoid more random crap being dropped on my feet. Now I’m closer to the window, which means I get splashed with rain when it’s really heavy and the wind is strong. Classy accommodations :)

Even though the rain is frustrating, we took advantage of the time “off” to paint and clean the house. Steph and Dan have been painting one room a year since they acquired this house, and there was only one room left to paint this year: the study/office. Painting here is a bit of an ordeal, because we have to sweep the walls for cobwebs, dust, and insect leftovers and then we have to wash the wails to get rid of accumulated dirt, etc. BUT it was really rewarding because it’s clean and bright in here and I know we cleaned out most of the spiders, for now. I have a desk in the study, so it’s nice to have it clean and bright (walls are nearly white). We had some leftover paint and decided to touch up the walls in the rest of the living space (kitchen and dining room), which cascaded into us sweeping and washing THOSE walls, and now the whole place is clean and bright. I found a decorative sarong that we’re putting up in the dining room for a splash of colour. It makes me happy.

Work room before:



Work room after:
Living room Before:


Living room After:



Alrighty, it’s now June 1 and we had ANOTHER rain day today. Today was the frustrating kind; we got up, got dressed, and drove to the park. I had just turned my recorder (I record bird song from 5-6am) and it started to rain. Then it started to rain harder. What makes matters worse is I didn’t know the shortcut to get back to the main road (which is where I’d be picked up), so I bushwacked up a cliff of sorts, dodging acacia trees and stepping in puddles. What an adventure.

Back at the house, we decided to take further advantage of our time off, and we tiled the kitchen sink. Now, this sounds like a decently easy job, but Stephanie and I worked on it all day today. Yesterday we prepped the area by peeling paint and applying the Plasterbond (whatever that is). Today we did the actual tiling part... and it took us just under 12 hours. What an ordeal. We didn’t know how thick to make the “bondex” mortor stuff, and then it kept making a mess, and the tiles didn’t want to stay on vertically... Anyways, at about 4:30 we placed the last tile and cleaned up. Tomorrow is grout day. Then we have to apply caulking and then it’ll be finally done!!! We should have started this project on the first rain day. I’ll post photos of that project when we’re finished the whole shebang.

That’s pretty much all I have to say for now... it’s pretty boring when we don’t go out into the field!!!

rainy season

The rainy season official started a few days ago. Since then, we've had rain every day. It's been kind of annoying, actually.... We get up at the usual 4am, head off to the park and start doing out field research. Then around 6am it starts raining and we have to go back home. I just wish it was raining at 4am so we didn't even get out of bed!!!! Today was worse. It was raining as we got out of the car at our study site... we waited it out a bit but ended up leaving by 5:30. Really frustrating.

On the bright side, it's allowed me to catch up on some of the work I've been getting behind on. so I guess that's nice.

Today we started painting one of the rooms in the field house. It's the last room that hasn't been painted, so it'll be nice when it's finished. Boy did we uncover a lot of spiders when we moved the furniture around. Blah.

Erm I don't have much else to say so i guess that's it.

This picture is a storm front that was coming in one day. We thought it would dump a ton of rain but it was pretty anticlimactic and we didn't get any rain that day. This was before the rainy season....

Monteverde

Yesterday I had my first hot shower since leaving Canada. It was wonderful.

We're in Monteverde, a really touristy cloud forest in Costa Rica. We delayed our 3rd day off and bumped up our 4th day off to form a weekend proper, and we made the 3 hour drive from our home in Santa Rosa to a hotel in Monteverde.

We had a rain day yesterday. We went out into the field at the usual time (4:30am) and were rained out by 6:15. This works for me seeing as my best data is collected between 5am and 6am. We then left for Monteverde around 9:30 or so. Almost as soon as we got here, it started raining. Well... it IS the rainy season, I guess. We hung out in our room (Jess, Celia, David and I) and I played with my computer. After we had dinner, Jess Celia and I spend the evening reminiscing over old music and singing to old 90s dance music. It was fun. We used the "strobe effect" on our headlamps and had a party.

Today we went for a hike in the forest. But before we went into the forest itself, we hung out in a hummingbird garden. So far, I think that has to be the highlight of my trip. There were at least 7 different species of hummingbird and they were all flying around these hummingbird feeders. I took A LOT of photos, but they're still on my camera so I'll post some later. At one point, I realized how tame some of the hummingbirds were, and I got my face within about 3 inches of the hummingbird feeder, with hummingbirds on it. I even reached up my hand really slowly and pet a couple hummingbirds. I couldn't believe it. fortunately Jess was taking photos at the same time, so I have proof that I tickled a wild hummingbird's belly!!

I'm currently sitting on a balcony of a restaurant using the free wireless. I had a full meal but I'm still feeling hungry! I'm glad I'll be eating dinner in a couple hours :)

I've been posting photos on my flickr site.

Ugliest bird in the world

A few weeks ago, we found a nest cavity for a woodpecker species. My supervisor has become very interested in woodpeckers over the last little while, so we investigated. Stephanie, Dan’s wife, has a fancy tool that we’ve called the “peeper”. It’s an infrared camera that you attach to a pole, and it has wires leading to a screen so you can see what’s the camera can see. She plans to use it for checking nests that are too tall to reach by hand. We decided to use the camera to peep in the nest cavity. Sure enough, a little woodpecker nestling was inside!

A few days after the initial peep, we decided we wanted to band it so that we can ID it later as the nestling we know of. Dan climbed up on a ladder and grabbed the nestling from the cavity. And OMIGOSH it was UGLY. It turns out the legs were too thick to put a legband on, so we just took a lot of photos. UGLY.

The photos, in order:

1) Adult pale-billed woodpecker at nest cavity

2) What the nestling looked like on the screen of the peeper – not very clear!

3) The nestling, showing what I’ve called the “ugly chicken skin”

4) The nestling, reaching out its neck as if it’s going to be fed by a parent

5) The nestling, with its head in the position its probably most used to – reach up for food from mom or dad!



PS: While connecting to the wireless internet to post this blog and check my email, I had to avoid sitting down on a tarantula. Just thought you'd like to know